Pros and Cons of Viral marketing on "Act On" campaign

We know that there are many examples that companies use viral marketing to increase brand awareness and to achieve marketing objectives. In fact, the using of viral marketing is not limited to companies, but also the government. In 2009, Barack Obama's presidential win had about as much to do with social media and viral marketing skills, he accomplished this by strategically tapping into nearly every major social media outlet.At the time of Obama's inauguration in January 2009, the President had 13 million people on his email list, 3 million online donors, 5 million friends on more than 15 different social networking sits including 3 million friends on Facebook, 8.5 million monthly visitors to MyBarackObama.com, nearly 2,000 official YouTube videos (with more than 80 million views and 135,000 subscribers), and more than 3 million people signed up for his text messaging program, that's why he won in the election. Now, Hong Kong governemt would like to learn what's Obama did. Let's discuss the pros of using Viral marketing on "Act ON" campaign.

1. Reachable
Viral marketing concerns on reaching people through internet. Hence, you can reach anyone at anytime and any places. That means there is no limitation on who you can reach.Hong Kong government can reach its target audience, included youth gorups by using these social network ( Facebook and Youtube).

2. Cost effective
Viral marketing usually uses techniques like joining social networks, building profiles, writing blogs and making videos. So, you can do whatever you want with a small cost or even free of charge.Compare to the traditional advertising, the cost must be much lower by using these social network.

3. Fast recognition
Without any restrictions or reservations, medium allows you to be as creative as you want. When people come over with the creative advertising many times, they will start recognizing the Act On campaign. People are easy to remember those advertising videos and logo, it helps the Hong Kong government to sell their political campaign.

There are always advantages and disadvantages in everything; there are no exceptions, especially for viral marketing. Now, let me explain cons of viral marketing as below.

1. Nuisance Factor
People get so many internet noises everyday; they have difficulty to determine which message they should pay attention to. The message, just like a spam mail, is likely to be deleted or ignored instead of being passed on to the other people. Therefore, the messages posted by government might be ignored.

2. Negative Buzz
People most likely to talk about the bad things rather than the good things, people will not take time to proof the negative news. As a result, public most like to concern about the bad news ( source: http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/100601/3/icl4.html) rather than the content of the " Act on" campaign.

3.Hard to measure
Viral marketing can be a hit and miss proposition, or unless the campaign is being handled by experience individuals; it can be very difficult to determine whether it is a worthwhile proposition. The effectiveness of using viral marketing in this case is difficult to measure.